ALBANY – A staggering 85 percent of New Yorkers favor empowering school administrators to choose merit over tenure when firing teachers, bolstering Mayor Bloomberg’s dogged fight to ditch the union-backed “last in, first out” protections, according to a new poll.

The statewide Quinnipiac University survey, released today, found voters prefer performance over seniority — 85 percent to 12 percent — as the principle measure to determine which teachers to lay off during budget cuts.

“By a huge majority, voters from every group oppose LIFO,” said Quinnipiac pollster Maurice Carroll.

“Voters, especially voters with kids in public school, want to keep the best teachers on the job — and to heck with seniority.”

Surprisingly, the poll found 75 percent of voters in households with union members support using merit and performance in determining layoffs of teachers rather than seniority. Only 20 percent of those voters questioned favored the seniority-based protections.

In general, New York state residents believe that it should be easier to fire public-school teachers, 62 percent to 33 percent.

At the same time, the support for rewarding “outstanding” educators with pay hikes is backed 64 percent to 33 percent.

The poll found widely divergent views on individual teachers and the powerful unions that represent their interests in the halls of government and across the bargaining table.

Some 50 percent of New Yorkers report favorable opinions about the state’s public-school teachers, compared to 22 percent who had unfavorable views.

However, 51 percent say teachers unions, like the city’s 164,000-member United Federation of Teachers, play a “negative” role in the state’s education system. Some 39 percent believe the unions have a positive impact.

That’s a dramatic shift from the last time Quinnipiac asked that question in 2004. At that time, New Yorkers said teachers unions had a positive role, 48 percent to 35 percent.

The findings can only help Bloomberg’s efforts in Albany to overhaul the state’s “last in/first out” job protections in advance of as many as 4,666 teacher layoffs under the mayor’s preliminary budget.

Calls to change such time-honored seniority rules — which have long been considered a central tenet to organized labor — have grown across the country as governors, mayors and school administrators cope with ballooning budget gaps.

The poll of 1,457 registered voters statewide has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.